A few years back my mom got a pacemaker: her doctor thought a heart rate of 22 beats a minute seemed a touch low.
This month her cardiologist detected that the pacemaker wasn’t operating properly and mom needed to have another procedure, a procedure that only another doctor could do.
So, I contacted the referred correct doctor who just happened to be in the same office as my defibrillator specialist.
Well, now my mom needs a ride from her home in St. Charles to south county. Not for the procedure (that’s closer to July 4th than Memorial Day, despite documented urgency) because her home doctor works in the SSM system: they don’t share their files with Mercy doctors. The Mercy doctor got a ‘report’ from mom’s doc but my mom needs to repeat her chest x-ray and such for the new guy.
This did not surprise me. My cardiologist is part of St. Luke’s. He doesn’t even get reports on my defibrillator since that device is controlled by Mercy. I had to copy a summary off the My Mercy page – type in medium grey over a light grey background and finesse that into a Word document – so I could mail my cardiologist the paragraph on the 1,400 times my heart went into atrial fibrillation over 74 days after I contracted COVID.
Nor is this a new way of doing things. Back in 2009 when I had a bit of sudden cardiac death in Des Moines (making my daughter’s graduation from Drake University very memorable), Mercy Hospital there couldn’t get the record from my 1999 surgery at St. Anthony’s in St. Louis.
And, a couple of years before that my wife had to get her second mammogram in two months because St. Anthony’s wouldn’t share with her BJC affiliated doctor.
While the Hippocratic Oath has a line about, “I will do no harm or injustice to him,” the Hospital Administrator’s Oath obviously says, “We will own our patients and not share them while they still have money.”
Remember, hospital groups are not small operations. Per 2019 IRS filings (available at GuideStar.com), BJC had annual revenue of $5.5 billion, SSM in St. Louis brought in $1.6 billion and even with complicated camouflage, Mercy/Mercy East earned $170 million+ and St. Luke’s made at least $72 million. Despite being technically ‘non-profit’ organizations, hospital groups vacuum a lot of money out of the economy. Keeping patients under their thumb increases the money yield.
Doesn’t that seem wrong?
In 2004, the Bush Administration issued an executive order calling for EHRs [electronic health records] for all Americans within ten years. The 2009 economic stimulus plan promised $27 billion for health IT that included payments of $44,000 to $64,000 over five years to doctors if they used EHRs. Ten years and billions of dollars later, only a small portion of doctors use EHRs largely based on the cons they see in using the records.
https://healthinformatics.uic.edu/blog/the-quest-for-standardized-electronic-health-records/
Almost 17 years after George W. Bush administration made shareable electronic records the goal, well, guess what? Those “cons,” you see, include having to share patient information with other health care groups.
Your affiliated hospital group still wants to own you.
Glenn